Obituary Notices: Mrs. Elizabeth S. Hurley

MRS. ELIZABETH S. HURLEY, superintendent of the Children’s Aid Society’s Elizabeth Home for Girls, died of heart disease at the home, No. 307 East 12th street, on Monday. She had been in the service of the society for fifty-four years, and in spite of her advanced age—nearly eighty years—was active and efficient until within a week of her death. Mrs. Hurley began her work for the society in the East River Industrial School, in East 40th street, in the shanty district then (1855) known as Dutch Hill. Mrs. Hurley in all the years of her service cared for upward of twenty thousand girls, endeavoring to teach them habits of industry and to turn them from evil courses. She sent out to situations about three hundred annually, trained for various duties, from laundry work and dressmaking to stenography and typewriting. Her influence and training are to be held responsible, the officers of the society say, for the fact that 12,000 women had led useful lives. Mrs. Hurley was a widow, her husband, an army surgeon, having died in service in the Civil War.

Mrs. Hurley is not the Elizabeth for whom the Home for Girls is named; that honor goes to Elizabeth Davenport Wheeler. Miss Wheeler’s family donated the property at 307 12th Street to the Children’s Aid Society, which moved the previous “Girl’s Temporary Home” there from 27 St. Mark’s Place in 1892.